GaWC Research Network: John Harrison

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John Harrison

GaWC Associate Director (Regional and City Governance)

John Harrison joined GaWC at Loughborough in 2006. His contribution to GaWC relates to issues of city and regional governance. Conceptually his work explores how accelerated processes of global economic integration, matched by global differentiation and rapid urbanisation, produce new metropolitan landscapes and responds to the challenge this presents for conceptualising urban-regional space. His main contribution to this endeavour has been determining the processes underpinning the construction of a new ‘regional world' characterised by the formation of new, more networked, urban-regional spaces in the latest phase of globalization. This research contributes to our understandings of how and why new spaces of networked urban-regional governance variously complement, compete, contradict, or overlap with extant, territorially-embedded, planning and governance arrangements in different space-times. With a strong focus on the geo-politics of city-regionalism, empirically this work entails analysing how these new 'city-region' constructs are often defined, designated, and delimited in order to 'fit' formal territorial structures of governance. This work is currently being extended to examine alternative models of metropolitan governance, not least of which is focused on exploring the rise of new non-state metropolitan development strategies designed, orchestrated, and implemented by non-state actors in the private sector.

John Harrison is Reader in Human Geography in the School of Social Sciences and Humanities at Loughborough University, UK. He was awarded the Routledge Regional Studies Association Award for Early Career Excellence in 2011 and is currently an editor of Regional Studies.